The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

People often refer to viewing great art, hearing a symphony, or listening to an inspiring speaker as (crypto) religious experiences.

As we traced the word “awe” back in history, we discovered that it has always had a link to fear and submission in the presence of something much greater than the self.

Maslow’s goal was to demonstrate that spiritual life has a naturalistic meaning, that peak experiences are a basic fact about the human mind.

Peak experiences make people nobler, just as James had said, and religions were created as methods of promoting peak experiences and then maximizing their ennobling powers.

Maslow echoed Eliade in claiming that science has helped to de-sacralize the world, that it is devoted to documenting only what is, rather than what is good or what is beautiful. One might object that there is an academic division of labor; the good and the beautiful are the province of the humanities, not of the sciences.

It is important to note that the self is not exactly the rider—much of the self is unconscious and automatic—but because the self emerges from conscious verbal thinking and storytelling, it can be constructed only by the rider.

An unfortunate tendency of three-dimensional societies is that they often include one or more groups that get pushed down on the third dimension and then treated badly, or worse.

If the third dimension and perceptions of sacredness are an important part of human nature, then the scientific community should accept religiosity as a normal and healthy aspect of human nature—an aspect that is as deep, important, and interesting as sexuality or language (which we study intensely).

10 Happiness Comes from Between

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There is no God and no externally given meaning to life, I thought, so from one perspective it really wouldn’t matter if I killed myself tomorrow. Very well, then everything beyond tomorrow is a gift with no strings and no expectations.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a gigantic computer built to answer the Holy Question spits out its solution after 7.5 million years of computation: “forty-two.”

Once the Holy Question has been re-framed to mean “Tell me something enlightening about life,” the answer must involve the kinds of revelations that human beings find enlightening. There appear to be two specific sub-questions to which people want answers, and for which they find answers enlightening. The first can be called the question of the purpose of life: “What is the purpose for which human beings were placed on Earth? Why are we here?”

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The second sub-question is the question of purpose within life: “How ought I to live? What should I do to have a good, happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life?”

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Aristotle asked about aretē (excellence/virtue) and telos (purpose/goal), and he used the metaphor that people are like archers, who need a clear target at which to aim.13 Without a target or goal, one is left with the animal default: Just let the elephant graze or roam where he pleases. And because elephants live in herds, one ends up doing what everyone else is doing.

The two questions can, however, be separated. The first asks about life from the outside; it looks at people, the Earth, and the stars as objects—“Why do they all exist?”—and is properly addressed by theologians, physicists, and biologists. The second question is about life from the inside, as a subject—“How can I find a sense of meaning and purpose?”—and is properly addressed by theologians, philosophers, and psychologists. The second question is really empirical—a question of fact that can be examined by scientific means.

If people are like plants, what are the conditions we need to flourish? In the happiness formula from chapter 5, H(appiness) = S(etpoint) + C(onditions) + V(oluntary activities), what exactly is C? The biggest part of C, as I said in chapter 6, is love. No man, woman, or child is an island. We are ultrasocial creatures, and we can’t be happy without having friends and secure attachments to other people. The second most important part of C is having and pursuing the right goals, in order to create states of flow and engagement.

(I define work broadly to include anyone’s answer to the question “So, what do you do?”

“One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one’s work.”

The effectance motive helps explain the progress principle: We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them because, as Shakespeare said, “Joy’s soul lies in the doing.”

When workers had occupational self-direction, their work was often satisfying.

More recent research finds that most people approach their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career, or a calling.

If you see your work as a calling, however, you find your work intrinsically fulfilling—you are not doing it to achieve something else. You see your work as contributing to the greater good or as playing a role in some larger enterprise the worth of which seems obvious to you. You have frequent experiences of flow during the work day, and you neither look forward to “quitting time” nor feel the desire to shout, “Thank God it’s Friday!” You would continue to work, perhaps even without pay, if you suddenly became very wealthy.

Take the strengths test27 and then choose work that allows you to use your strengths every day, thereby giving yourself at least scattered moments of flow.

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Work at its best, then, is about connection, engagement, and commitment. As the poet Kahlil Gibran said, “Work is love made visible.”

Happiness comes not just from within, as Buddha and Epictetus supposed, or even from a combination of internal and external factors (as I suggested as a temporary fix at the end of chapter 5). The correct version of the happiness hypothesis, as I’ll illustrate below, is that happiness comes from between.

His interviews showed that every path is unique, yet most of them led in the same direction: from initial interest and enjoyment, with moments of flow, through a relationship to people, practices, and values that deepened over many years, thereby enabling even longer periods of flow.

Vital engagement does not reside in the person or in the environment; it exists in the relationship between the two.

Whenever a system can be analyzed at multiple levels, a special kind of coherence occurs when the levels mesh and mutually interlock. We saw this cross-level coherence in the analysis of personality: If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living.

People are multilevel systems in another way: We are physical objects (bodies and brains) from which minds somehow emerge; and from our minds, somehow societies and cultures form.36 To understand ourselves fully we must study all three levels—physical, psychological, and sociocultural.

You can’t just invent a good ritual through reasoning about symbolism. You need a tradition within which the symbols are embedded, and you need to invoke bodily feelings that have some appropriate associations. Then you need a community to endorse and practice it over time. To the extent that a community has many rituals that cohere across the three levels, people in the community are likely to feel themselves connected to the community and its traditions.

But conflict, paralysis, and anomie are likely when a community fails to provide coherence, or, worse, when its practices contradict people’s gut feelings or their shared mythology and ideology.

Religions do such a good job of creating coherence, in fact, that some scholars38 believe they were designed for that purpose.

Altruism could be explained away as a special kind of selfishness, and anyone who followed Darwin in thinking that evolution worked for the “good of the group” instead of the good of the individual (or better yet, the good of the gene),42 was dismissed as a mushy-headed romantic.

For ants and bees, the queen is not the brain; she is the ovary, and the entire hive or colony can be seen as a body shaped by natural selection to protect the ovary and help it create more hives or colonies. Because all members really are in the same boat, group selection is not just permissible as an explanation; it is mandatory.

But as long as each human being has the opportunity to reproduce, the evolutionary payoffs for investing in one’s own welfare and one’s own offspring will almost always exceed the payoffs for contributing to the group; in the long run, selfish traits will therefore spread at the expense of altruistic traits.

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Evolutionary theorists have therefore stood united, since the early 1970s, in their belief that group selection simply did not play a role in shaping human nature.

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If you make the models more realistic, more like real human beings, group selection jumps right out at you. Wilson points out that human beings evolve at two levels simultaneously: genetic and cultural.

A caste system then restricts marriage to within-caste pairings, which in turn alters the course of genetic evolution. After a thousand years of inbreeding within caste, castes will diverge slightly on a few genetic traits—for example, shades of skin color—which might in turn lead to a growing cultural association of caste with color rather than just with occupation. (It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences of appearance and behavior in other mammals.)50 In this way, genes and cultures co-evolve;51 they mutually affect each other, and neither process can be studied in isolation for human beings.

(Consistent with Wilson’s proposal, the geneticist Dean Hamer recently reported evidence from twin studies that suggests a particular gene may be associated with a stronger tendency to have religious and self-transcendent experiences.)55

By making people long ago feel and act as though they were part of one body, religion reduced the influence of individual selection (which shapes individuals to be selfish) and brought into play the force of group selection (which shapes individuals to work for the good of their group). But we didn’t make it all the way through the loophole: Human nature is a complex mix of preparations for extreme selfishness and extreme altruism.

From Wilson’s higher perspective, there is no contradiction. Group selection creates interlocking genetic and cultural adaptations that enhance peace, harmony, and cooperation within the group for the express purpose of increasing the group’s ability to compete with other groups. Group selection does not end conflict; it just pushes it up to the next level of social organization.

What if the group was human beings?

From Wilson’s perspective, mystical experience is an “off” button for the self. When the self is turned off, people become just a cell in the larger body, a bee in the larger hive.

McNeill’s conclusion suggests that synchronized movement and chanting might be evolved mechanisms for activating the altruistic motivations created in the process of group selection.

We were shaped by individual selection to be selfish creatures who struggle for resources, pleasure, and prestige, and we were shaped by group selection to be hive creatures who long to lose ourselves in something larger. We are social creatures who need love and attachments, and we are industrious creatures with needs for effectance, able to enter a state of vital engagement with our work. We are the rider and we are the elephant, and our mental health depends on the two working together, each drawing on the others’ strengths.

The final version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from between. Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality.

It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.

11 Conclusion: On Balance

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A society without liberals would be harsh and oppressive to many individuals. A society without conservatives would lose many of the social structures and constraints that Durkheim showed are so valuable.

A good place to look for wisdom, therefore, is where you least expect to find it: in the minds of your opponents.